In her off-duty moments, she went into the recently Blitzed areas and sketched, thus accumulating a bank of background material for her sequence of powerful oil paintings and engravings of bombed buildings. These are among her most arresting and innovative work; just as exposure to the social realities of working-class London sharpened her political awareness, so the ruined and dramatic landscape created by the Blitz seems to have given a new intensity and energy to her paintings and engravings. Chimneys stand stark against smoky skies, iron girders twist and rear, interior walls of floorless buildings bear the ghostly exuberance of an overmantel, the flourish of a cornice, a patch of patterned wallpaper. Unfazed by a situation that changed with each night's wave of bombers, she drove to and from Stepney each day:
Last night, driving back through the City, it was most exciting. A policeman told me it was impossible [to drive], but luckily I knew a way from coming through in the morning. We bumped over fire hoses all the way and passed rows and rows of engines and pumps. Every here and there the firemen silently playing their hoses on smouldering buildings – all in the dark, of course.
By this time in 1940 many people were only too anxious to leave London, and even more desperate to get their children out. As other cities too were targeted, the demand for evacuation spread and the matter of finding billets became more and more urgent. It was also considerably more problematic. The country was now wise to what might lie in store; the inclination to perform a patriotic duty was more often tempered with a sense of self-preservation. But the authorities had learned some lessons from the chaotic scenes of the September 1939 evacuation. There would be no more unstructured mass exits, with parties of children simply herded on to the next train, regardless of destination; no more of those pathetic scenes in church and village halls, with labelled children awaiting selection by some host, ‘scenes reminiscent of a cross between an early Roman slave market and Selfridges bargain basement…’ (in the much-quoted words of the deputy evacuation officer to the West Hartlepool Local Education Authority).
On 3 September 1939 I was at Golsoncott, aged six, visiting England – a place I did not know and would barely remember – for the last time until 1945. I would shortly return to Egypt, where I had been born and would spent the rest of my childhood, caught up in a different theatre of the war. Sitting on the carpet in the Golsoncott drawing-room, I heard a thin dry man's voice coming from the wireless and wondered why we all had to sit in silence and why everyone looked so solemn.
At Williton station, four miles away, the war had begun two days before. Four hundred schoolchildren and their teachers arrived, allocated to the Watchet area; a similar number went to Minehead. On the next day, Saturday 2 September, the Williton Rural District Council reception party stood ready for 800 of an agreed allocation of 2,000 London schoolchildren. Billets had already been found, in Williton itself and the surrounding area. Local district officers had worked hard during the summer – as had their colleagues all over the country – responding to the government directives in anticipation of intensive bombing of London as soon as war broke out. They knew where they were going to put every single one of those children.
When the train arrived at 3.30 p.m. it carried a load of passengers somewhat different from that expected: 700 mothers with babies and toddlers, plus pregnant women. Heroically, the Williton officials and their helpers set to and somehow found accommodation for everyone before mid-night – a whole swathe of new billets. They dared not use up the original ones lest the trainload of children and teachers awaited should turn up after all. It never did, but on the Monday another 770 mothers and children arrived. Within three days the district's population had increased by 1,500.
The chaos of that three-day evacuation exodus stemmed from the fact that while preparations had been dutifully carried out in the so-called reception areas in earmarking billets, not enough thought had been given to the logistics of moving such large numbers by train with such rapidity out of the cities. This accounts for the intense complications over which contingents of evacuees were to go to which destination. There were indeed plans and arrangements, but in the event the parties of children, and of mothers and children, arrived at the main London stations from their various gathering points in such a continuous stream and in such numbers that they had to be marshalled on to the first available train, regardless of where it was going or who it was expecting to take, before the station reached saturation point.
Hence the confusion so vividly recalled in later life by both the adults and children involved. The platforms packed with little figures slung about with gas masks, cardboard suitcases, brown paper parcels. The interminable journeys without sustenance or lavatories; the late-night arrivals at some unknown destination where sharp-eyed hosts waited to pounce on the least unappealing-looking evacuees. Curiously, many of the children recalled an atmosphere of excitement and expectation, though for most this soon evaporated as they confronted the reality of exile with strangers. For the adults concerned those three hectic days in September 1939 and their aftermath must have been very different. Teachers had to try to cope with stressed, unruly and disorientated charges under difficult circumstances – frequently there were no adequate classroom facilities available at the reception destination, or they had to accept the grudging hospitality of local schools and share premises on a rota basis. Parents had to say goodbye without knowing how or when they would see their children again. Visiting was of course possible, and government subsidy was available for those unable to find the cost of rail fares – but in wartime conditions travel was difficult, and many of the children had been sent far from their homes.
Above all, there was the grim prospect of imminent attack, fostered by the precipitate nature of the evacuation exercise. Many people must have had an icy knot of fear in their stomachs. Anyone alive to official anticipation of what would probably happen in the first few days and weeks of war would have been expecting the end of the world that they knew. Since the early 1930s there had been a standing assessment of the potential damage from aerial bombardments in the event of the war with Germany, based on what was known of German rearmament and also on the extent of raids at the end of the First World War. It was considered that an initial mass bombardment of London and the south-east could result in 3,500 tons of high explosive falling on London in the first twenty-four hours, followed by 700 tons a day during the ensuing two weeks. The consequence would be an immediate exodus of 3 to 4 million people. The evacuation plans drawn up in the years before the war in anticipation of this outcome were not only to save lives; they were also intended to preempt the mass panic and consequent breakdown of law and order that would be one of the enemy's main objectives in such a bombardment.
It was considered that this initial attack could result in 600,000 civilian deaths, with twice that number of injuries. One person in twenty-five would be a casualty, with more in London itself. Such a prediction sounds like the Armageddon scenario of nuclear war; in that light the discovery by Mass-Observation researchers that numbers of Britons contemplated killing their families if war broke out is not perhaps too startling. And as a constant reminder of the chilling and unpredictable future there were the grim accessories – the sandbags banked against buildings, the blackout regulations, the gas masks.
Those gas masks. If anything is the potent symbol of evacuation, it is those dumpy little boxes hanging from every child. I had one myself, briefly, and remember its mysterious and worrying significance; I did not understand what it was, except that I must not lose it or I would die. It was my personal baggage on the flight across Europe in September 1939 to join my parents in Egypt. I think I did lose it, in Venice, and was soundly berated, but without it everything seemed less threatening.
In the event, of course, the 38 million gas masks issued in Britain were never needed. And the pre-war calculations of casualty levels, founded on incorrect assumptions based on the effects of bombing in 1917–18, proved to be considerable overestimates. The es
timate of fifty casualties per ton of high explosive dropped turned out to be more in the region of fifteen to twenty. The total figures of those killed and injured up and down the country during the Blitz are sobering enough, but they were nothing like what had been feared.
But it was chilling expectations that prompted the whole evacuation scheme. In such a climate the confusion of the September 1939 evacuation is entirely understandable. And then nothing happened – no bombs, just a few false alarms which set the sirens wailing as a sinister taster of what would come eventually. Down in rural areas, the sense of anticlimax must have exacerbated the grievances of those who had taken in evacuees. Since life was going on as normal in the cities, the spirit of willing sacrifice in order to save the nation's children gave way to one of irritation and dismay at the inconvenience of harbouring cuckoos in the nest.
There was a wide range of perceived difficulties. Eating and sleeping habits, behavioural problems, inadequate clothing, the insufficiency of the government subsidy for feeding evacuees (ios. 6d. per week for the first child, 8s. 6d. per head for further children). But the dominating grievances were nits and bed-wetting.
The nits problem raises a couple of interesting and baffling questions. There was widespread infestation by head lice among the evacuees from the cities – the figures served up by the indomitable National Federation of Women's Institutes 1940 survey show variations from place to place and group to group, but it is clear that a high proportion of city children were affected and, moreover, that their parents regarded this as a normal and inevitable inconvenience. But receiving country households were appalled and shocked. The implication seems to be that country children did not have nits. Why not? They, too, lived frequently in overcrowded and insanitary conditions; they, too, went to school. The head louse moves from one host to another – when children put their heads together over a desk or in play.
Nits were a social stigma, back then. Hence, I suppose, the tight-lipped dismay of the country hostesses, especially given the apparent nitlessness of country schools and homes. Today, things are rather different. The nit is ubiquitous. My four grandchildren have all had nits at some point; most children do nowadays, so far as I can make out. This is the second puzzle: why is the post-war louse no longer confined to an urban working-class environment? Are contemporary nits more socially mobile and widespread because they are of a different strain, or is there some other factor? Whatever the explanation, an interesting footnote to cultural change over the last fifty years is the fact that the head louse is no longer a social indicator.
In the autumn of 1939, the landscape was adorned with lines of drying bedsheets. There was a prolonged spell of unseasonably warm weather, fortunately. The problem of incontinence was the one that most perturbed those on whom the evacuees were billeted, and one can entirely see why – a nuisance at any time, a major challenge when without benefit of washing machines or central heating. And the problem was frequent, giving rise to much comment about dirty habits and inadequate toilet training. But there is a fine and correct distinction between bed-wetting, which is precisely that, and enuresis, which is what most of the offending evacuees suffered from. Enuresis is failure to control urination and ‘is an expression of mental protest. It is primarily a symptom of mental disturbance’ (Titmuss again – tersely accurate). In fact, there was plenty of recognition at the time that the evacuees' nocturnal lapses were due to distress, and the fact that in most cases enuresis ceased after a few weeks or months was a reassurance. But the concerned discussion of the difficulty both at the time and since is one of the instances when the historical record vividly reflects personal experience. Behind those figures and those analyses lie the individual traumas of hundreds of thousands of children, sleeping in strange beds and inadvertently protesting.
For the adults involved, the single most significant effect of the evacuation experience was a sweeping revision of the way in which they saw their country. For city-dwellers it was an eye-opener about how the other half lived, in every sense. Of those in intimate contact with the evacuees – hosts, officials – many saw the experience as ‘a dreadful lesson’, recognizing that the blame for the conditions from which so many had come must be laid at the door of the nation as a whole for allowing such deprivation.
But what of the children's wider experience? Evacuation was a notoriously polarized experience and it is dangerous to generalize; for some children it was an ordeal, but for many there was much that was positive. Many were received with warmth, grew attached to their foster parents and benefited from the opportunities offered. My husband Jack was one such fortunate evacuee. He and his brother Jim, aged ten and eight, were evacuated from a council estate in Newcastle-on-Tyne to the Cumbrian village of Maulds Mayburn. They were billeted on a farm – the sort of Lake District hill farm which in those days had changed little in 500 years. No electricity, no running water. The boys' previous experience of life beyond Newcastle had been restricted to brief summer stints in a caravan in Whitley Bay. Now, they found themselves caught up in the life of a working farm, where everyone was expected to turn to and help. Jack remembered helping to harness horses, carrying hot mash out to the hens on sharp winter mornings, haymaking, lambing. He remembered the killing of the pig and the side of bacon which hung all winter from a beam in the kitchen. He remembered exulting over the first fall of snow; the farmer, for whom snow was not good news, grimly sent him out into the yard and made him stay there till he understood what it implied. He remembered the integrated life of the hamlet, in which everyone farmed or was otherwise dependent upon a local economy. A few years ago, we visited Maulds Mayburn. The cottages and farmhouses were in spanking condition, outside each stood a Volvo or a Saab. It had become a weekenders' village.
His evacuee experience gave Jack a lifelong affinity with the country. More than that, it provided opportunity. The farmer's wife had been a schoolteacher. Helping Jack with homework brought back from the village school (which incorporated all the children in the area, aged from five to fifteen), she realized that he was a very bright little boy. She set about coaching him for entrance to Newcastle Grammar School, which itself had been evacuated to Penrith. He got in, and thus was propelled in the direction of Cambridge and his subsequent life as an academic.
Maulds Mayburn and Golsoncott in 1940 were both backwaters in which nothing happened except the routines of daily life, the cycle of the year. A farming community; a country house. Both seem like places exempt from the dictation of public events. They were not, of course – nowhere is. The war directed Jack and his brother to that farm, and when I look at my grandmother's sampler I can no longer see it as a conventional celebration of domestic certainties, knowing what I know. Once decoded, those small stitched figures seem to shimmer with significance. They are as formal and ordered as the rest of the sampler, which is itself faithful to the unchanging requirements of such pieces of work – it is in precise descent from its antecedents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, down to the stitches used and the disposition of important features. But the children are an element of meaningful disorder, when you know who they are. The turbulence of the twentieth century has invaded the quiet and private life of the sampler.
The Gong Stand, The Book of Common Prayer and the Potted-Meat Jars
The gong was in the hall, beside the vestibule door. The large brass disc was suspended within a wooden stand, surmounted by a ledge and with the felt-headed striker hanging from a hook. Time was, it was sounded to warn the family that a meal was about to be served – an imperious crescendo that would have been audible throughout the house. In my adolescence, it was seldom used and seemed to be a symbol of vanished rituals. By then, the pre-war posse of ‘staff’ was already mythical. The cook, the parlourmaid, the housemaids, the gardeners, the grooms. From time to time, when the going was good, there was a resident couple – the wife doing the cooking, the husband laying tables, lighting fires, stoking the boiler. He would also strike the gong, but with a diffi
dent hand, as though recognizing that this was barely appropriate under the circumstances.
The ledge that formed the top of the stand was still useful. Incoming mail was placed on it, and also letters to be posted. When my grandmother and aunt came down to breakfast on Sundays they put their copies of The Book of Common Prayer and their hymnals on the gong stand. I can see them now – the two neat stacks imbuing the morning with difference, and significance.
The potted-meat jars were kept in a box in the scullery cupboard. They too were symbolic of ritual. They came out at Easter, and at Easter only.
At Easter, at Christmas and at Harvest Festival the church had to be decorated. Harvest Festival passed me by – I would have been at boarding school. But the Easter and Christmas decorating rituals are like iron in the soul, to this day. The ice-cold church. The sodden ropes of ivy. The venomous branches of holly. The dripping flowers, the cavalcade of vases and pots and jugs. The potted-meat jars, above all.
The church is at Rodhuish, the small hamlet down the hill from Golsoncott. The little whitewashed chapel of St Bartholomew, built around 1250, is one of the smallest churches in the west of England. Its seven pews on either side of the aisle seat a congregation of sixty or so, with room for a few more in the gallery at the back, itself a relic of days when the music accompanying services was supplied by a local band. In the late 1940s there was an organ, out of tune, played by a local amateur and causing some distress to my grandmother, who was musical. The congregation could reach capacity at religious festivals, but for the rest of the year there was just the hard core of a dozen or so.